A Night at the Sushi Restaurant

It’s 7:30pm on a Saturday night. I decide I want to go for a walk. I leave my phone at home.

A walk with no destination. I just want to be outside, see some people, get some exercise.

I walk past a sushi place close to my apartment. Something about it makes me want to go inside. I tell myself I’ll hit it on the way back.

Walking down a busy street, people are out and about. It’s cold. Very cold in fact. But mind over matter, I tell myself. I keep on my walk.

I naturally make eye contact with people as I walk by them. Like almost everyone, though, I get the urge to look away once they glance back at me.

I remember this meditation game I once read about. “Make eye contact with strangers while you live your normal life, and force yourself to not look away.” Why not try it?– I ask myself. So I try it.

It becomes weirdly energizing. I walk by people, we make eye contact, and I force myself to not look away. Some strangers and I smile at each other. Others look away almost immediately. The game makes me realize how sometimes our self-consciousness is so overblown and so insignificant. Embarrassment and rejection won’t kill us. They never have and never will.

This continues and the more it goes on, the more fun it is. I can’t help but laugh at how crazy this might sound to someone if I told them what I was doing.

After some time walking, the cold begins to get to me. I turn around and make my way back to the sushi restaurant.

I walk inside to the sight of two employees. One rolling sushi, another taking an order over the phone. I read the menu for a few minutes until the gentleman is free to take my order.

“I’ll have a tuna roll, salmon roll, and the chicken wings with honey sauce.”

“15-20 minutes,” he says.

“Perfect.”

I sit down in the nearest booth and make myself comfortable. With my phone at home, I’m alone in this restaurant with nothing but my thoughts. An opportunity to be still, to be comfortable doing nothing. I recall Joe Rogan, who says he meditates in public whenever he has an opportunity to do so, like in the waiting room at the doctor’s office or at the dentist.

Sitting there, without my phone to distract me, some self-conscious and irrational thoughts arise.

“How should I best sit?”

“I wonder if they think it’s weird I’m just sitting here doing nothing.”

I know what my mind is doing. Rather than let my imagination run wild, I decide to watch it all play-out.

Gradually, the self-consciousness dissipates.

After 5 or 10 minutes, a feeling of quietness begins to consume me. Sitting there, observing workers of a Sushi restaurant run their operations, watching as other hungry customers come in to pick up the food they called in and anxious delivery drivers running in and out to get orders delivered on time.

Such a simple experience; there are restaurants functioning more or less like this all over the world. But feeling fully engaged and aware, it was an intrinsically interesting experience to take in.

Being present is like a quietness. It’s like an unspoken understanding. A patience.

An ability to sit still.

Through this stillness, gratitude makes its way in. Gratitude to be alive, to be able to experience life without the noise of a loud, distracted mind. Love for the world and being alive is purely natural, I believe.

After what seemed like both a short and long amount of time, my food was ready. I brought it back home and made myself a plate. Normally, I like to watch something on YouTube or listen to a podcast when I eat, but it felt disrespectful to do that now.

With my mind completely focused on the experience of eating, the food tasted that much better.

An hour or two later, I took out my laptop, and I wrote what you see here.